Urban resilience to pandemics : a multi-faceted framework for cities resilience quantification

Abstract

The current coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) affected 218 territories around the world, infected more than 60 million people, and killed more than one million. It is expected that the number of cases will continue to increase unless a vaccine becomes available to all countries. However, the coronavirus outbreak is much more than a health crisis. This pandemic poses numerous challenges on different sectors and exacerbates existing inequalities. COVID-19 exposed major problems with our cities and highlighted their limited resilience. In an ever-more interconnected world (social, environmental, technological), this crisis serves as an opportunity to rethink the way cities are planned, designed, built, and managed, to better prepare for future emergencies. Yet, while urban planning and design are often considered key factors for developing healthy and resilient cities, the longitudinal study of this research, which used 140 peer reviewed articles published in the top ranked planning journals, revealed that there is a dearth of literature that investigates pandemic urban resilience. The majority of the studies focus on single and specific events, usually related to climate change disasters and are especially directed towards establishing theories and finding drivers without operationalizing the concepts. Furthermore, governance and social learning are barely tackled. Likewise, putting theory into practice through physical planning is not addressed. Particularly, this body of literature suffers a lack of linkages between urban planning, resilience and pandemics, the scarcity of social learning and urban resilience governance researches, and the dearth of research methods with a particular focus on qualitative context-dependent and event-specific studies. In order to address these gaps, and knowing that meaningful data, and information available to decision-makers is the first requirement to improve response and make better decisions when a disease outbreak arises, this research develops a multi-faceted framework to quantify the pandemic resilience level of an existing settlement. First, the urban resilience is related to five dimensions and a conceptual framework is built. Second, appropriate indicators are selected and attributed to the most representative qualities of resilience. Last, a three layered hierarchical Bayesian network inspired from well-acknowledged definitions and concepts and using expert knowledge is constructed. This multi-faceted framework is a promising tool aimed at facilitating the decision-making process for authorities and communication between stakeholders. It uses available data, gathered mainly to measure the progress towards SDGs. The sensitivity analysis underscores the areas that significantly influence resilience and consequently the computed probability of the resilience level of a city could serve as a benchmark, on which future plans and improvements are based. The model is applied to Toronto city to investigate its resilience to the current COVID-19 outbreak. The findings reveal that the city has a moderate level of resilience to pandemics and needs to enhance its adaptive ability.